Amanda Gorman

THE OPEN ROAD

peace, love, happiness & understanding

February 4, 2021

Two weeks ago, at the Presidential Inauguration, Amanda Gorman, America’s first Youth Poet Laureate recited her poem “The Hill We Climb.” (Read it aloud.):

The Hill We Climb

Mr. President, Dr. Biden, Madam Vice President, Mr. Emhoff, Americans and the world: 

When day comes we ask ourselves where can we find light in this never-ending shade? The loss we carry a sea we must wade. We’ve braved the belly of the beast. We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace. In the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice. And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it. Somehow we do it. Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished. We, the successors of a country and a time where a skinny black girl descended from slaves and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president only to find herself reciting for one.

And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t striving to form a union that is perfect. We are striving to forge our union with purpose. To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man. And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us, but what stands before us. We close the divide because we know to put our future first, we must first put our differences aside. We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another. We seek harm to none and harmony for all. Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true. That even as we grieved, we grew. That even as we hurt, we hoped. That even as we tired, we tried that we’ll forever be tied together victorious. Not because we will never again know defeat, but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree and no one shall make them afraid. If we’re to live up to our own time, then victory won’t lie in the blade, but in all the bridges we’ve made. That is the promise to glade, the hill we climb if only we dare. It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into and how we repair it. We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it. Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated. In this truth, in this faith we trust for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us. This is the era of just redemption. We feared it at its inception. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, but within it, we found the power to author a new chapter, to offer hope and laughter to ourselves so while once we asked, how could we possibly prevail over catastrophe? Now we assert, how could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?

We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be a country that is bruised, but whole, benevolent, but bold, fierce, and free. We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation because we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Our blunders become their burdens. But one thing is certain, if we merge mercy with might and might with right, then love becomes our legacy and change our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country better than one we were left with. Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one. We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West. We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast where our forefathers first realized revolution. We will rise from the Lake Rim cities of the Midwestern states. We will rise from the sun-baked South. We will rebuild, reconcile and recover in every known nook of our nation, in every corner called our country our people diverse and beautiful will emerge battered and beautiful. When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid. The new dawn blooms as we free it. For there is always light. If only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.

—Amanda Gorman  January 20, 2021

Here’s a link to a video of her reciting the poem:

https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000007561374/poet-amanda-gorman-inauguration.html?searchResultPosition=1

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Prabu sent me his thoughts on Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection.:

Tolstoy’s final novel opens in a courtroom, where Dmitri Nekhlyudov, a landowning aristocrat, called onto jury service, finds out that Katusha, his teenage love, is among the three accused of a murder and theft. Katusha used to be a maid at his aunt’s estate when Nekhlyudov first met her. They fell in love and she eventually became pregnant with his child.

In 19th century Russia, it was not uncommon for an aristocrat to impregnate a maid. Tolstoy himself had a similar affair with one of his household servants before his marriage. Nekhlyudov doesn’t feel any moral obligation for Katusha or the child. He moves forward with his aristocratic life—becomes a soldier, returns to the civil society, drinks, has affairs with married women, and courts a young princess for marriage.

Katusha’s journey, however, takes a different turn. Who wants a pregnant maid in the staff quarters, after all? She gets kicked out of her job in the estate. She finds several jobs, but repeatedly gets molested at work. She gives birth to a son and leaves him in a  orphanage. Circumstances get her into prostitution. She accepts her condition and gets a legal permit from the government. One day a wealthy client of hers, who torments her for a whole evening, gets killed in the hotel room. She is accused of the murder and ends up in the courtroom. She even gets wrongly convicted and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia, due to some petty negligence of the men on the jury and the judge. 

For Nekhlyudov, the truth that his actions lead to Katusha’s ill fate starts to sink in. His Christian conscience seeks pardon for his sins. He immediately approaches a lawyer and appeals for a hearing of her case in the Senate. He also decides to marry her, if she consents. 

Has Nekhlyudov turned into a moral human? Where was this conscience all these years?  Why was he able to go on living without thinking about the consequences of his actions? These aren’t my questions. Tolstoy’s protagonist questions himself along these lines. The answer, as Nekhlyudov and Tolstoy would discover, is somewhere hidden in the values of landowning in feudal Russian society. 

Nekhlyudov’s abandonment of love for the pursuit of pleasure and status was the injustice which occurred in the spiritual realm. In the worldly realm, the feudalistic idea of treating land and earth simply as a property that certain privileged humans can own and control at the expense of other humans, like farmers and peasants, is the underlying crime. In the novel Nekhlyudov realizes this and seeks remedies for it by distributing most of his estates to the peasants and keeping only what is essential to support a simple life for himself.

The Senate rejects Katusha’s case and she, along with other prisoners, begins walking on the 3000 mile journey to Siberia. He writes to the Tsar, explaining the jury’s mistake in her case, and decides to follow her to Siberia. Through his interaction with some of the other prisoners, he discovers that there are several innocent people among them. He tries to help them by all possible means, but often comes up against the power and wealth of his old aristocratic way of living. At times it even allures him to retreat into it.  His conscience  resists. He can seek cure for his own past mistakes, but how much can he change the injustices in society? Would his well-intended actions lead to any fruitful results? What is one to do with evildoers, like those who murder someone?

Tolstoy concludes by reflecting on the centuries old practice of punishing criminals:

“For many centuries people who were considered criminals have been tortured. Well, and have they ceased to exist? No; their numbers have been increased not alone by the criminals corrupted by punishment but also by those lawful criminals, the judges, procureurs, magistrates and jailers, who judge and punish men. Nekhlyudov now understood that society and order in general exists not because of these lawful criminals who judge and punish others, but because in spite of men being thus depraved, they still pity and love one another.

Doesn’t the Gospel tell the same in the Sermon on the Mount?—that man should not only not demand an eye for an eye, but when struck on one cheek should hold out the other, should forgive an offence and bear it humbly, and never refuse the service others demand of him.”

Like Nekhlyudov, I also lay silent in my bed on this rainy night, waiting for the first light of dawn to touch my window and imagining a society where these principles were carried out in practice. Only a century has passed between us.

—Prabu Muruganantham

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The conclusion of Prabu’s essay reminds me of William Blake’s words:

Love to faults is always blind,

Alwasy is to joy inclin’d,

Lawless, wing’d & unconfin’d,

And breaks all chains from every mind.

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May all people be happy.

May we live in love.

—Johnny